The Assassins
Page 25
‘I’ll be telling a few select relations, Narayan said, ‘and if they don’t like it, they can bloody well lump it. I won’t flaunt it in their faces, but I refuse to be furtive about my gayness any longer. I hope they’ll at least acknowledge it and not treat it as some shameful secret… or some rare, unmentionable disease.’
Clare was really pleased.
‘I’ll certainly stand by you,’ she said.
‘I’ll do so too,’ Tammy promised, ‘whatever the ignorance and bigotry you’re bound to meet, especially among the middle-aged and elderly.’ He laughed. ‘Just when straight people start to give up marriage, gay people decide to take it up. I thought you gays were so independent, yet here you are aping us benighted straights.’
‘Tammy, if you go on being so cynical,’ Clare said, ‘Narayan may not ask you to be his best man.’
‘I don’t want Tammy as my best man,’ Narayan said. ‘He’s far too sarky and phlegmatic. Anyhow, we’re each other’s best men, Max and I. We want it to be just the two of us.’
‘So that’s my reputation, is it?’ Tammy protested. ‘Cynical, sarky and phlegmatic.’
‘You’re still such an ersatz Englishman,’ Narayan said. ‘You’re terrified of showing emotion of any kind.’
‘The result of your education at that frigid English school,’ Clare added, ‘where the warmth of human feeling is so suspect. Thank God I’ve managed to cure you just a bit.’
As Max and Narayan approached the sea temple in the dusk, they had to make their way past the new discoveries. Another granite elephant had been revealed; someone had hung a string of marigolds around its head. The archaeologists were digging down around another piece of sunken stone, and the couple wondered what image would eventually emerge. Possibly Vishnu and Lakshmi, symbols of married love. Possibly Hanuman, a symbol of human loyalty. Just possibly a holy serpent.
Holy? Max recalled the old man on the Andaman Islands, whose daughter had been bitten by a snake from out of the sea, and how he’d thought of the inexplicable cruelty of the world of nature. It was believed the tsunami had caused over a quarter of a million deaths altogether, and had left five million homeless. About fifty thousand had died on the coast of Tamil Nadu alone, and the cold anonymity of their deaths appalled Max. Their destruction seemed so arbitrary and final. He thought of Subramaniam’s words: ‘The souls of the departed are beyond destruction. They migrate into other earthly forms or merge at last into the Atman.’
Max longed to accept this difficult belief, as he’d longed to do when Rick had died. He had set up a trust fund to help the surviving fishing community in Sandeha. He’d named the trust after Rick, wanting to commemorate him as well as all those whose names would soon be lost, especially the unknown children swept out to sea, drifting for a while with the silent undercurrents or lying among the coral ridges. He was determined that Rick’s life should not to be forgotten, that he shouldn’t fade into the oblivion that had seemed to quietly haunt him as he lay dying.
They’d reached the sea temple and up they climbed, he and Narayan. The also time they did this was in the intense head of the day, but now night was falling. As Max reached up for the handholds, some of the scenes of destruction he’d witnessed came to mind, but the memory, like the memory of Rick’s death, seemed to be losing something of its pain. He remembered Rick’s last ironic smile, the sudden laughter of some children among the horrors of Banda Aceh, the laughter of the archaeological divers as they put to sea to film the nameless underwater temple.
He wished for laughter for himself as well, believing it went with the detachment the Bhagavad Gita taught: the release from pain and grief as well as from fear and anger. He’d taken that little book on his travels, reading it repeatedly so as not to be overwhelmed by the suffering he’d seen. He recalled a passage about the terrors of Arjuna, which ended with the face of Krishna bending down upon him, bringing him peace of spirit at last. More than ever, Max longed to love one god, ultimately benevolent in some mysterious way. Krishna’s claim to be both the father and the mother of the universe, an intelligent light in its fathomless obscurity, made Max long for it to be true, if only as a metaphor to give some transcendent meaning to our precarious existence on this lonely little planet.
He thought of Kamila and how she had found light and meaning in the existence of her stunted little girl. It was a sadness that much haunted him. But Tammy, true to his word, had provided her with a dowry and she had indeed married a widowed fisherman; and Clare was looking into the possibility of Kamila having IVF.
As Max and Narayan climbed, they placed their feet gently on the stonework. Max turned to look at the immensity of the ocean, the beauty and the peace of which seemed ruthlessly ironic when he thought of the recent destruction it had caused. As he thought of the survivors, he hoped that his book would make some contribution, however modest, to growing world opinion in favour of far more foreign aid. Yesterday he’d watched the many Live 8 rock concerts being broadcast across the globe, and he felt cautiously optimistic about their ideal of reducing poverty in Africa. He’d already decided that his next book would be about AIDS in Africa: he’d focus on the hospitals and drugs that were so urgently required and the widespread need to educate people about prevention through the use of condoms, which he believed should be free. He also wanted to learn the cost of arms sold by the West to African governments, relative to what they spent on health. He’d already discussed this with Narayan, who had offered to help with his research and to come with him on his travels when his job allowed. Narayan hoped as much as Max did that this challenging shared enterprise would strengthen their bond.
Max suddenly became aware of the risk of falling so far to the beach, which intensified the excitement of feeling Narayan so physically close, breathing fast and sweating. Soon they neared the finial of the temple. At the prospect of holding Narayan tightly in his arms, Max felt the blood pulse in his veins. Narayan was the first to reach the top and he stretched down a hand to help Max up.
They stood there in solitude, the sun gone down. Narayan took the thali from his pocket, hung it around Max’s neck and then tied a knot in it. Then Max put the ring he held on Narayan’s finger. After they’d embraced and kissed, a long lingering kiss, they stood in silence to watch the moonlight glisten on the emerging buried carvings far below and the gently rolling and withdrawing waves.